The Autocracy and the Proletariat[2]

Published:Vperyod, No. 1, January 4, 1905 (December 22, 1904).

      Published according to the text in the newspaperVperyod.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Foreign Languages Publishing House,1962,

      Moscow,Volume 8,

      pages17-28.Translated:Bernard Isaacs and The Late Isidor LaskerTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      (2003).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Russiais experiencing a resurgence of the constitutional movement. Our
      generation has never witnessed anything like the present political
      ferment. Legal newspapers are attacking the bureaucracy, demanding
      participation of the people’s representatives in the state administration,
      and pressing for liberal reforms. All varieties of meetings of
      Zemstvo officials,[3]doctors, lawyers, engineers, farmers,
    municipal councillors,[4]etc., etc., are adopting resolutions more or less
    definitely demanding a constitution. Passionate appeals for liberty and
    political accusations of a boldness to which the Russian man in the street
    is unaccustomed can be heard at every turn. Under pressure of the workers
    and the radical youth, liberal gatherings are converted into open public
    meetings and street demonstrations. Undercurrents of discontent are
    manifestly stirring among wide sections of the proletariat, among the poor
    of town and country. Although the proletariat is taking a comparatively
    small part in the more spectacular and ceremonious manifestations of the
    liberal movement, although it seems to be standing somewhat aloof from the
    polite conferences of the solid citizens, everything points to the fact that
    the workers are keenly interested in the movement. Everything points to the
    fact that the workers are eager for big public meetings and open street
    demonstrations. The proletariat is holding itself back, as it were,
    carefully taking its bearings, gathering its forces, and deciding the
    question whether or not the moment for the decisive struggle for freedom has
    come.

Apparently,the wave of liberal excitation is beginning to subside somewhat. The
rumours and foreign newspaper re ports to the effect that reactionaries have
gained the upper hand in the most influential Court circles are being
confirmed. The ukase of Nicholas II, published the other day, was a direct slap
in the face for the liberals.[5]The tsar intends topreserve and uphold the autocratic regime. The tsar does notwantto change the form of government and has no intention of granting a
constitution. He promises—only promises—all manner of reforms
of a quite paltry nature. No guarantees, of course, are given that these
reforms will really be implemented. Police restrictions against the liberal
press are becoming daily and hourly more stringent. All open demonstrations
are being suppressed again, if anything, with greater severity than
before. The screw is being put on the liberal councillors again, both
Zemstvo[6]and municipal, still more so in the case of those officials who play the
liberal. The liberal newspapers are falling into a despondent tone and
apologising to their correspondents for not publishing their letters, which
they dare not do.

Itis quite within the realm of possibility that the wave of liberal agitation
which rose so rapidly after the permission granted by
Svyatopolk-Mirsky[7]will abate just as quickly after the new ban. One must
distinguish between the profound causes, which inevitably and unavoidably
lead—and will lead more and more—to opposition and struggle against
the autocracy, and the trivial reasons of a passing liberal ferment. The
profound causes lead to profound, powerful, and persistent popular
movements. Trivial reasons are at times Cabinet changes or the usual attempt on
the part of the government to pursue for an hour the policy of “the sly
fox” after some terrorist act. The assassination of Plehve[8]evidently cost the terrorist organisation tremendous effort and involved
long preparation. The very success of this terrorist act hears out all the more
strikingly the experience of the entire history of the Russian revolutionary
movement, which warns us against such methods of struggle as terrorism. Russian
terrorism has always been a specifically intellectualist method of
struggle. And whatever may be said of the importance of terrorism, not in lieu
of, but in conjunction with, the people’s movement, the facts irrefutably
testify that in our country individual political assassinations have nothing in
common with the forcible actions of the people’s revolution. In capitalist
society a mass movement is possible only as a class movement of the
workers. This movement is developing in Russia according to its own independent
laws; it is proceeding in its own way, gaining in depth and in breadth, andpassing from a temporary lull to a new upsurge. It is only the liberal wave
that rises and falls strictly in accord with the moods of the different
ministers, whose replacement is accelerated by bombs. Small wonder, then,
that sympathy with terrorism is to be met with so often in our country
among the radical (or radical-posing) representatives of the bourgeois
Opposition. Small wonder that; among the revolutionary intelligentsia, the
people most likely to be carried away (whether for long or for a moment) by
terrorism are those who have no faith in the vitality and strength of the
proletariat and the proletarian class struggle.

Thefact that the spurt of liberal activity for one or another reason is
short-lived and unstable cannot, of course, make us forget the irremovable
contradiction that exists between the autocracy and the needs of the developing
bourgeois society. The autocracy is bound to be a drag on social
development. The interests of the bourgeoisie as a class, as well as
the interests of
the intelligentsia, without which modern capitalist production is inconceivable,
clash more and more with the autocracy as time goes on. Superficial though the
reason for the liberals’ declarations may be and petty though the character of
the liberals’ half-hearted and equivocal position, the autocracy can maintain
real peace only with a handful of highly privileged magnates from the landowning
and merchant class, but in no sense with that class as a whole. Direct
representation of the interests of the ruling class in the form of a
constitution is essential for a country that wants to be a European country and,
on pain of political and economic defeat, is obliged by its position to become a
European country. It is therefore extremely important for the class-conscious
proletariat to have a clear understanding both of the inevitability of the
liberals’ protests against the autocracy and of the actual bourgeois character
of these protests.

Theworking class is setting itself the great and epoch- making aims of
liberating humanity from every form of oppression and exploitation of man by
man. Throughout the World it has striven hard for decades on end to achieve
these aims, steadily widening its struggle and organising itself in mass
parties, undaunted by occasional defeats and temporary set-backs. Nothing can be
more vital for such a truly revolutionary class than to rid itself of all
self-deception, of allmirages and illusions.One of the most widespread and persistent illusions with
      us in Russia is the notion that our liberal movement is not a bourgeois
      movement, and that the impending revolution in Russia will not be a
      bourgeois revolution. The Russian intellectual, from the most moderateOsvobozhdeniyeliberal[9]to the most extreme Socialist-Revolutionary,[10]always thinks that one makes our revolution
    colourless, that one degrades and vulgarises it, by admitting it to be a
    bourgeois revolution. To the Russian class-conscious proletarian this
    admission is the only true class characterisation of the actual state of
    affairs. To the proletarian the struggle for political liberty and a
    democratic republic in a bourgeois society is only one of the necessary
    stages in the struggle for the social revolution which will overthrow the
    bourgeois system. Strictly differentiating between stages that are
    essentially different, soberly examining the conditions under which they
    manifest themselves, does not at all mean indefinitely postponing one’s
    ultimate aim, or slowing down one’s progress in advance. On the contrary, it
    is for the purpose of accelerating the advance and of achieving the ultimate
    aim as quickly and securely as possible that it is necessary to understand
    the relation of classes in modern society. Nothing but disillusionment and
    unending vacillation await those who shun the allegedly one-sided class
    point of view, who would be socialists, yet are afraid openly to call the
    impending revolution in Russia—the revolution that has begun in
    Russia—a bourgeois revolution.

Characteristically,at the very height of the present constitutional movement,
the more democratic of the legal publications took advantage of the unusual
freedom to at tack, not only the “bureaucracy”, but also the
“exclusive and hence erroneous theory of the class struggle” which
is alleged to be “scientifically untenable” (Nasha
Zhizn,[11]No. 28). If you please, the problem of bringing the
intelligentsia closer to the masses “has hitherto been dealt with solely
by throwing the emphasis on the class contradictions existing between the masses
and those sections of society from which ... the greater part of the
intelligentsia springs”. Needless to say, this presentation of the facts
is completely at variance with the real state of affairs. The very opposite is
true. The entire mass of the Russian legally-active uplift intelligentsia, allthe old Russian socialists, all political figures of theOsvobozhdeniyetype have always completely ignored the
profound nature of the
class contradictions in Russia in general and in the Russian countryside in
particular. Even the extreme Left Russian radical intelligentsia, the
Socialist-Revolutionary Party, sins most in ignoring this fact; one need only
recall its usual arguments about the “labouring peasantry”, or about
the impending revolution being “not a bourgeois, but a democratic
one”.

No,the nearer the moment of revolution draws and the more acute the
constitutional movement becomes, the more strictly must the party of the
proletariat guard its class in dependence and not allow its class demands to be
swamped in general democratic phrases. The more frequently and decidedly the
representatives of so-called society come for ward with what they claim to be
the demands of the whole people, the more relentlessly must the Social-Democrats
expose the class nature of this “society”. Take the notorious
resolution of the “secret” Zemstvo congress. held on
November 6-8.[12]You will find there, thrust into the background, deliberately hazy and
half-hearted constitutional aspirations. You will find mention there of the
people and society, more often society than the people. You will find the most
detailed and comprehensive suggestions for reforms of the Zemstvo and municipal
institutions — institutions, that is, which represent the interests of the
landowners and the capitalists. You will find mention of reforms in the living
conditions of the peasantry, of the liberation of the peasantry from tutelage,
and of the safeguarding of correct judicial forms. It is quite clear that you
are dealing with representatives of the propertied classes who are only bent on
securing concessions from the autocracy and have no thought of changing in any
way the foundations of the economic system. If people like these want a
“radical [allegedly

			       radical][1]change in the present state of inequality
and oppression of the peasantry”, it only proves anew that the
Social-Democrats were right in tirelessly stressing the backwardness of the
system and of theliving conditions of the peasantry in relation to the general conditions of the
      bourgeois order. The Social-Democrats have always urged that the
      class-conscious proletariat should strictly distinguish in the general
      peasant movement the over-riding interests and demands of the peasant
      bourgeoisie, however much these demands may be veiled and nebulous, and
      in whatever cloak of utopian “levelling” the peasant ideology
      (and “Socialist-Revolutionary” phrase-mongering) may invest
      them. Take the resolutions of the engineers’ banquet in St. Petersburg on
      December 4. You will find that the 590 banquet guests, and together with
      them the 6,000 engineers who subscribed to the resolution, declared for
      a constitution, “without which Russian industry cannot be properly
      protected”, while at the same time protesting against the placing of
      government orders with foreign concerns.

Cananyone still fail to see that it is the interests of all sections of the
landowning, commercial, industrial and peas ant bourgeoisie which are at the
bottom of the constitutional aspirations that have erupted to the surface? Are
we to be ’led astray by the fact that these interests are represented by the
democratic intelligentsia, which everywhere and always, in all European
revolutions of the bourgeoisie, has assumed the role of publicists, speakers, and
political leaders?

Agrave task now confronts the Russian proletariat. ’The autocracy is
wavering. The burdensome and hopeless war into which it has plunged has
seriously undermined the foundations of its power and rule. It cannot maintain
itself in power now without an appeal to the ruling classes, without the sup
port of the intelligentsia; such an appeal and such support, however, are bound
to lead to constitutional demands. The bourgeois classes are trying to force an
advantage for them selves out of the government’s predicament. The government is
playing a desperate game; it is trying to wriggle out of its difficulties, to
get off with a few paltry concessions, non-political reforms, and non-committal
promises, with which the tsar’s new ukase is replete. Whether this game will
succeed, even temporarily and partially, will in the long run depend on the
Russian proletariat, on the degree of its organisation and the force of its
revolutionary onset. The proletariat must take advantage of the political
situation, which is greatly in its favour. The proletariat must support the
constitutional movementof the bourgeoisie; it must rouse and rally to its side the broadest
possible sections of the exploited masses, muster all its forces, and start an
uprising at the moment when the government is in the most desperate straits and
popular unrest is at its highest.

Whatimmediate form should the proletariat’s support of the constitutionalists
take? Chiefly, the utilisation of the general unrest for the purpose of carrying
on agitation and organising the least involved and most backward sections of the
working class and the peasantry. Naturally, the organised proletariat,
Social-Democracy, should send its forces among all’ classes of the population;
yet the more independently the classes now act, the more acute the struggle
becomes, and the nearer the moment of the decisive battle approaches, the more
should our work be concentrated on preparing the proletarians and
semi-proletarians themselves for the direct struggle for freedom. At such a
moment only opportunists can qualify the speeches of individual workingmen in
Zemstvo and other public assemblies as a very active struggle, or a new method
of struggle, or the highest type of demonstration. Such manifestations can only
be of quite secondary importance. It is far more important now to turn the
attention of the proletariat to really high and active forms of struggle, such
as the famous mass demonstration in Rostov and a number of mass demonstrations
in the South.[13]It is far more important now to increase our ranks,
organise our forces, and prepare for an even more direct and open mass conflict.

Ofcourse, there is no suggestion in this that the ordinary day-to-day work of
the Social-Democrats should be abandoned. Social-Democrats will never give up
that work, which they regard as the real preparation for the decisive fight; for
they rely wholly and exclusively on the activity, the class-consciousness, and
the organisation of the proletariat, on its influence among the labouring and
exploited masses. It is a question of pointing out the right road, of calling
attention to the need for going forward, to the harmfulness of tactical
vacillations. The day-to-day work, which the class conscious proletariat should
never forget under any circumstances, includes also the work of
organisation. Without bread and diverse workers’ organisations, and without
their connection with revolutionary Social-Democracy, it is impossibleto wage a successful struggle against the autocracy. On the other hand,
      organisational work is impossible without a firm rebuff to the
      disorganising tendencies displayed in our country, as everywhere else, by
      the weak-willed intellectual elements in the Party, who change their
      slogans like gloves; organisational work is impossible without a struggle
      against the absurd and reactionary organisation-as-process
      “theory”, which serves to conceal confusion of every
      description.

Thedevelopment of the political crisis in Russia will now depend chiefly on the
course of the war with Japan. This war has done more than anything else to
expose the rottenness of the autocracy; it is doing more than anything else to
drain its strength financially and militarily, and to torment and spur on to
revolt the long-suffering masses of the people, of whom this criminal and
shameful war is demanding such endless sacrifices. Autocratic Russia has already
been defeated by constitutional Japan, and dragging on the war will only
increase and aggravate the defeat. The best part of the Russian navy has been
destroyed; the position of Port Arthur is hopeless, and the naval squadron sent
to its relief has not the slightest chance of even reaching its destination,
let alone of achieving success; the main army under Kuropatkin has lost over
200,000 men and stands exhausted and helpless before the, enemy, who is bound to
crush it after the capture of Port Arthur. Military disaster is inevitable, and
together with it discontent, unrest, and indignation will inevitably increase
tenfold.

Wemust prepare for that moment with the utmost energy. At that moment, one of
the outbreaks which are recurring, now here, now there, with such growing
frequency, will develop into a tremendous popular movement. At that moment the
proletariat will rise and take its stand at the head of the insurrection to win
freedom for the entire people and to secure for the working class the
possibility of waging the open and broad struggle for socialism, a struggle
enriched by the whole experience of Europe.

[1]Interpolations in square brackets (within passages quoted by Lenin)
have been introduced by Lenin, unless otherwise indicated.—Ed.

[2]Lenin’s article“The Autocracy and the Proletariat”was
    published as an editorial in issue No. I of the newspaperVperyod.

Vperyod(Forward) was an underground Bolshevik weekly published in Geneva
from December 22, 1904 (January 4, 1903), to May 5 (18), 1905. Eighteen numbers
were issued. The newspaper’s organiser, manager, and guiding spirit was
V. I. Lenin. Other members of the Editorial Board were V. V. Vorovsky,
M. S. Olminsky, and A. V. Lunacharsky.

Theoutstanding role which the newspaper played in combating Menshevism,
re-establishing the Party principle, and formulating and elucidating the issues
posed by the rising revolution was acknowledged in a special resolution of the
Third Party Congress, which recorded a vote of thanks to the Editorial Board.

Overforty articles and minor items by Lenin were published inVperyod.Some issues of the newspaper, e.g., Nos. 4 and 5, which dealt with the events of
January 9 (22), 1905, were written almost entirely by Lenin.

Vperyodmaintained regular contacts with the Party organisations in
Russia. Especially close connections existed with the St. Petersburg, Moscow,
Odessa, Baku, Ekaterinoslav, and other Party committees, as well as with the
Caucasian League Committee of the R.S.D.L.P., which formed a special publicists’
group to assist Lenin’s paper.

Lenin’sarticles inVperyodwere often reprinted in the local
Bolshevik press and published in the form of leaflets and pamphlets.

[3]Zemstvo—thename given to the local government bodies formed
in the central provinces of tsarist Russia in 1864. They were dominated by the
nobility and their powers were limited to purely local economic problems
(hospital and road building, statistics, insurance, etc.). Their activities
were controlled by the Provincial Governors and by the Ministry of the
Interior, which could rescind any decisions of which the government
disapproved.

[4]Municipal councillors—members of municipal councils in tsarist
 Russia.

[5]The reference is to the tsar’s ukase of December 12 (25), 1904, to
 the Senate.

[6]Zemstvo councillors—membersof Zemstvo assemblies in tsarist
 Russia.

[7]The reference is to the tsarist government’s brief flirtation with the
      liberals in 1904. Svyatopolk-Mirsky, the Minister of the Interior,
      sanctioned the Zemstvo meetings, slightly relaxed the censorship, pardoned
      several banished liberal politicians, etc.

[8]Plehve, V. K.—a statesman in tsarist Russia; between 1902 and
1904 Minister of the Interior and Chief of the Gendarmes. He waged
a bitter fight against the revolutionary movement.

[9]Osvobozhdeniyeliberals—bourgeois liberals grouped round
the magazineOsvobozhdeniye (Emancipation), which was published abroad
in 1902-05 under the editorship of P.B. Struve. TheOsvobozhdeniyeliberals organised the liberal-monarchistOsoobozhdeniyeLeague in
January 1904. Later they formed the nucleus of the
 principal bourgeois party in Russia—the
 Constitutional-Democratic Party (Cadets).

[10]Socialists-Revolutionaries(S. R. ’s)— a petty-bourgeois party in
Russia, which arose at the end of 1901 and the beginning of 1902 as a result of
the union of the Narodnik groups and circles. The news paperRevolutsionnaya Rossiya (Revolutionary Russia) (1900-05) and the magazineVestnik Russkoi Revolutsii (Herald of the Russian Revolution) (1901-05)
became its official organs. The views of the S.R.’s were an eclectic mixture of
the ideas of Narodism and revisionism; they tried, as Lenin put it, to patch up
“the rents in the Narodnik ideas” with “bits of fashionable
opportunist ’criticism’ of Marxism”. (See present edition, Vol. 9,
“Socialism and the Peasantry”, p. 310.) The S.R.’s failed to see
the class distinctions between proletariat and peasantry, glossed over the class
differentiation and contradictions within the peasantry, and rejected the
proletariat’s leading role in the revolution. The tactics of individual
terrorism which the S.R.’s advocated as a basic method of struggle against the
autocracy caused great harm to the revolutionary-movement and made it difficult
to organise the masses for revolutionary struggle.

Theagrarian programme of the SR.’s envisaged the abolition of private ownership
of the land and its transfer to the village communes on the basis of equalised
tenure, as well as the development of all forms of co-operation. There was
nothing socialistic in this programme, which the SR.’s sought to present as a
programme for “socialising the land”, since abolition of private
ownership of the land alone, as Lenin pointed out, cannot abolish the domination
of capital and the poverty of the masses. The real, historically progressive
content of the S.R. agrarian programme was the struggle for the abolition of
landlord ownership, for the “American” way of capitalist development
in Russian agriculture. This programme objectively expressed the interests and
aspirations of the peasantry at the stage of the bourgeois-democratic
revolution.

TheBolshevik Party fought hard against the attempts of the SR.’s to camouflage
themselves as socialists and to spread their influence to the working class,
against their tactics of individual terrorism; the S.R. ’s were the chief
opponents of the Bolsheviks, who struggledto gain influence over the peasantry and to strengthen the alliance
between the working class and the peasantry. At the-same time, on definite
conditions, the Bolsheviks concluded temporary agreements with the SR.’s in the
struggle against tsarism.

Inthe final analysis, the absence of class homogeneousness in the peasantry was
responsible for the political and ideological instability and the
organisational confusion in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, and for its
constant vacillation between the liberal bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There
had been a split in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party during the first Russian
revolution, its Right Wing forming the legal Toilers’ Popular-Socialist Party,
which held views close to those of the Constitutional-Democrats and the
“Left” Wing taking shape as the semi-anarchist league of
“Maximalists”. During the Stolypin reaction, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party experienced a complete ideological and organisational break-down,
and the First World War saw most SR.’s adopt the standpoint of
social-chauvinism.

Afterthe victory of the February bourgeois-democratic revolution in 1917, the
SR.’s, together with the Mensheviks and Constitutional-Democrats, were the
mainstay of the counter-revolutionary bourgeois-landlord Provisional
Government, in which leaders of the party (Kerensky, Avksentyev, Chernov)
participated. Influenced by the revolutionising of the peasantry, the
“Left” Wing of the S.R. s founded an independent party of Left
S.R.’s at the end of November 1917. Striving to maintain their influence among
the peasant masses, the Left S.R.’s formally recognised the Soviet power and
entered into an agreement with the Bolsheviks, but with the development of the
class struggle in the villages they turned against the Soviet power. During the
foreign military intervention and the Civil War, the SR.’s carried on counter-revolutionary subversive activity, strongly
supported the interventionists and whiteguard generals, took part in
counter-revolutionary plots, and organised terrorist acts against leaders of the
Soviet state. After the Civil War, the S.R.’s continued their hostile activity
against the Soviet state within the country and abroad among whiteguard
émigrés.

[11]Nasha Zhizn (Our Life)—a newspaper close to the Left Wing of the
Constitutional-Democrats, published in St. Petersburg between
1904 and 1905.

[12]Lenin applies the word “secret” ironically to the congress of
chair men of Zemstvo Boards and other Zemstvo officials which was due to be held
on November 6, 1904, in St. Petersburg by permission of the tsar. Five days
before the opening, when the delegates had

be gunto arrive, it was announced
that the tsarist government had proposed the postponement of the congress for a
year. ·However, Minister of the Interior Svyatopolk-Mirsky, who was
flirting with the liberals, allowed the Zemstvo delegates to have a chat
“over a cup of tea in private apartments”.

[13]The famous Rostov strike broke out on November 2 (15),
    1902. It quickly developed into a political demonstration in which up to
    thirty thousand workers took part. The strike lasted until November 25
    (December 8). It was led by the Iskrist Don Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. (See
    present edition, Vol. 6, “New Events and Old Questions”,
    pp. 278-83.)

Thenumber of mass demonstrations in the Southmentioned by Lenin
refers to the mass political strikes and demonstrations which took place in the
South of Russia in 1903, involving the Transcan casus (Baku, Tiflis, and Batum)
and the chief Ukrainian cities (Odessa, Kiev, and Ekaterinoslav).